


East of Sun and West of Moon

by flora_tyronelle



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Love, M/M, Transformation, Violence, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2020-11-26 05:00:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20924567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flora_tyronelle/pseuds/flora_tyronelle
Summary: The night was black and full and thick like syrup, begging to be lived in, ready to be drunk like a draught, down in one swallow...A curse made in moonlight and an endless quest for love.





	1. Red Skein

**Author's Note:**

> Team Embarkment, Image Prompt:

The night was black and full and thick like syrup, begging to be lived in, ready to be drunk like a draught, down in one swallow. The Lamb walked on. The night could have been bright like daybreak, and he would not have noticed. The forest sighed beneath his bloody feet with the quiet whispers of crushed leaves, above his head with faint chirrups of sleeping animals, and far above that the stars crooned down to the green velvet of the trees- but the Lamb did not notice. He bled, and he walked, and all the while his hands clutched the objects most dear to him in the whole wide world. The moths in the branches twitched and flew down to those hands, drawn by the glow of golden light. And so he proceeded, through the woods, down the withy-winding path, blood on the earth behind him, a vanguard of frantic brown wings all around him, walking on and on until he came at last to the witch’s cottage.

This was his second visit. It was ever a strange and changeable place, sometimes grand, sometimes ramshackle, guarded by naught but a briar patch and the hoary fingers of a sagging old willow. The black brook that had given the tree home gurgled away even in the darkness. The Lamb fixed his eyes upon the door, illuminated by the object he carried in his hands. The witch would know he was here. She always knew.

He had barely set foot amongst the brambles when the door opened noiselessly. Candlelight spilled outwards, meeting with a seeming joy the gentle brightness that was cradled in his palms. The moths flickered anxiously away. Red berries, red blood, red moon; black night, black brook, black silhouette against the mellow light.

“Remus,” the witch said. “Remus Lupin. You have returned.”

~

The Lamb’s world had begun in darkness, too, although he did not know it. The witch who had given him life would permit no light in the birthing room; the father who had held him for the first time had not seen the newborn’s face. He had instead cried hot tears over his living son and his dead wife, the one who had died before she could release their child into the world. When there had been blood and sorrow, the witch had offered her help. Except her help came at a price.

“The babe is mine, by the old right and the new.” A wizened hand had brushed the Lamb’s slick, soft head. The father had merely shivered. “Bury the maid as you wish, but the babe is mine.”

She had had a soft voice, the old woods witch, soft and low and scratched with fair humour and foul fortune. The father had not given her a chance to speak again. He drew the silver dagger from the inside of his jacket and took her through the throat, a wordless, bloody act in the oppressive darkness. The babe in his arms did not even cry out. Death and life; so much of it in that tiny underground room. The father had found his way out, staggered to the surface, back under the boles of the great trees. Rain was still streaming down.

Far behind him, when he was almost back at the village on the edge of the woods, the witch’s cottage began to howl.

The curse came every full moon after that: a great white she-wolf, stalking the forest, stealing livestock and those foolish enough to go out to hunt her. The villagers would hear her howl and cringe behind their shutters. They shot dark looks at the Lamb and his father. But nobody ever asked, and the father never told what had gone on in that dark burrow of a birthing room. He had taken his dying wife into the woods and come out with a living son. There was a black kind of magic in that act alone. That was all the villagers needed to know. After all, they had all grown up on tales of the woods witch: only tales, only stories. Make-believe.

They believed in the white wolf, though. Before the Lamb grew old enough to get his real name, she slaughtered all nine hunters who had gone into the woods under the cold light of the full moon. She would leave pieces at the edge of the village for others to find: a hand, a foot, a small token of her savagery. There was never a body to bury. The father noticed this. So did the villagers. They stared at the skinny boy with mudstone eyes and looked for marks of magic, of darkness. They found none.

_Remus_, his father named him, when he was ten summers old. It was an odd name, and late to do it besides. The other villagers whispered that old Lupin must have been afeared the child would die, to put it off so long. _Unnaturally_ afeared. But the boy kept living, and the heroes who heard tell of the monstrous wolf kept arriving, and one by one they kept dying, ripped apart, left like trophies for the dawn and still living to find. Remus watched a deal, and learned a little, and gradually began to wonder why his father would never set foot in the forest, and why he would always lock the door on the full moon. Not from the inside- but from the out. Before the old man died he had impressed the importance of this upon Remus. _Always lock the door. The shutters are not enough, boy._ Remus had believed him. Although he found work after his father passed on and could not always be spared the night, when the moon was a fat silver coin in the sky and the wolf began to howl, he always returned home, and he always locked the iron lock tight behind him.

When he was nineteen summers old, and summer was still flush on the valley, a man rode into the village.

Remus, who tended the horses at the lowslung inn, held his horse when he dismounted in the late evening quiet. The horse was narrow and ill-tempered, with a coat like dull copper, drenched from a seasonal squall and eager to pin his ears back and snarl. His rider, however, was another thing altogether. Clad in a black wrapper drawn up over his head, Remus nonetheless spied a flash of silver mail and the hilt of a sword pressing against the thick fabric. Another hero, then. Remus shook his head.

The hero paused in drawing back his hood. “You misgive. Why?”

Remus had not expected such a bold confrontation; it surprised him into plain speech. If only he could have seen himself then, those earthy eyes flashing in a nut-brown face, he might have begun to understand what was to come. But, alas- he did not.

“Nobody has ever faced the wolf and lived.” Whenever he spoke of the wolf, his gut would twinge. It was odd.

“Perhaps I am not here for the wolf,” the hero replied. Remus felt something entirely different to a twinge inside him- it was as though a small creature had suddenly awoken, sniffing the air. The stranger’s voice carried a tone of gentle humour that he did not fully understand, but instinctively knew. It was _friendly_. People were not friendly to him, as a rule.

“Perhaps not,” he allowed. Then he glanced back at the sulky horse. “But ‘tis a poor place to look out anything else.”

“You do not love your home, then?” The hero was taking down his saddlebags all of a sudden, as though spurred into motion. Before Remus could reply, he continued. “But then again, who does?”

Remus found the question confounding. Nobody here chose to leave, and the only people who came in were those after the wolf.

“What is your name?” The hero had turned around once more and his hood was at last down, his arms cradling baggage, and his face was even more confounding than his words.

“Remus.” It was a half-whisper, nearly swallowed by the irritable swish and stamp of the chestnut horse.

“Sirius.” The two of them stared at one another for a brief moment, before the hero turned away.

“You’re early for the full moon,” Remus blurted out. “It just passed two days ago.”

Sirius paused, on his way back out of the stables. Then he merely said, “Aye, I know,” and disappeared back into the pounding rain, leaving Remus to breathe quiet and hold onto the chestnut horse’s bridle like a lifeline- until at last the stallion snapped at him and grabbed hold of his arm, leaving a bruise that would last for several days.

When the morning came, Remus scrambled down from his cot in the hayloft and made haste through his duties. He was eager to go inside and view this new stranger- this _Sirius_\- maybe breaking his fast, perhaps find him even prepared to exchange a few words again. It was a foreign sensation to Remus, the boy who had only been known as “the Lamb” until he was ten summers old. The taste of _wanting_ was almost intoxicating.

But he did not find Sirius inside.

“The tall cove?” The innkeep sniffed deeply. He did not much care for Remus, but most of the other lads worked the farms. The strange boy from out by the woods came cheap to tend the visiting horses. “He went out.”

“Out?” Remus felt stymied, stuck to the flagstone floor, drawn up short against an invisible wall. “When?”

“Early.”

There was nothing more to be gotten out of the taciturn old man, so Remus turned away. At a loss, he returned to the hayloft. The morning was still fresh outside though, still buzzing with summer flies and filtered sunshine dripping sweet like honey down from the thick white clouds, so he moped only a short while. Then he dropped down the ladder and strode off through the village.

It was a small place, as places went. Most tithed and sowed the good land on the edge of the forest; some set nets in the streams; next to none took the winding road south-east to find their fortune. The wolf seemed far away on days such as these. It was easy to forget the silver light of the moon and the black caresses of the trees that sang the howling song of fright and darkness, the staccato of the shutters banging closed, the endless dread of waiting. It was high summer and there was living to be done. Even Remus, who existed on the margins where he existed at all, could see that. He walked with his head held up and thumbs tucked in his pockets, and although a few of the children looked at him, none made to shout. There was a shelter in the sunshine, in the long, heady days. Remus intended to enjoy it as long as he could.

Only… he felt restive. _Sirius_. He had chewed on the name all last night, laid up in the loft with the sweet scent of last year’s meadow thick in his nostrils, feeling the taste of the word on his tongue. It was somehow noteworthy to him that their names sounded so similar. _Remus. Sirius_. He had never met anyone with a name even close to his own before. His father had offered no explanation for his choice and Remus had instinctively known not to ask. _Sirius. Remus._ Sirius must be well-travelled. That stallion of his had hooves worn hard by long, dusty roads, and his saddlebags had been heavy. So different from himself: born here, a boy here, a man here, sure to die here, no path to sweep him away. Although if Sirius sought the wolf, perhaps he would die here, too.

They did not look alike, not according to that rain-drenched look of the previous evening. Sirius was snow-white where Remus was brown, sharply carved with raven hair where Remus, who had never seen his own face apart from in the distorted ripples of the stream, somehow still knew he was made with a softer outline. Yet. He found he had no inclination to think of anything else.

Remus walked out through the great bowl of the valley, following the cart tracks past fields of whispering barley and green-leaved roots, watching the swallowing green of the forest loom up in front of him. Long ago, all the valley had been covered by trees, carved up and restrained by endless roots. None quite knew what had forced them back. Some said fire. Some said water. Some said witchcraft. But what was left was still a forest that stretched away over the crest of the hills, ever-growing, deep and shadowy and beyond reach or comprehension. It skulked on the edges of the fertile, living village, vaguely threatening, even on a sunny day. All the children knew it was dangerous; all the children played there in the daytime, setting dares, climbing trunks, fencing with branches. Remus had never, though. Fear of his father’s wrath had kept him away. Perhaps that was why, now he was a man, it drew him like a lodestone.

On the brink of the trees, where the saplings and ferns were beginning their grasping stretch towards the sky, Remus looked back. The little houses; the big barns. The wooden fences, already looking tumbledown. The inn. On the hillside beyond, sheep were grazing in disordered flocks. Remus could make out the ambling specks of shepherds and their slinking dogs. The sunshine on his face; the shadows nipping at his heels. It was oddly delightful.

Then he turned and picked his way under the canopy.

The forest was a damp, green place. Clearings were swiftly colonised. Streams gurgled piecemeal through every nook and cranny, painting boulders with velvety moss. Underbrush flourished with a thousand shades of verdant colour. The few goat tracks that animals used every so often would shift and sway like clouds, parting and re-joining as they were swept aside by the endless devouring growth. You could not rely on the paths. They were as treacherous as wind on the sea.

Remus had learned the trees, instead. The forest had many different kinds of tree; so many that some of them were not even named, and even those that were had been scant remembered. Children had more constant names for them: brittle-fingers, silver-skin, fat-trunk, old-man’s-beard. They lived a long time, if left alone. Their roots crunched through earth and stone, ever hungry, rising ribbed and knobbly to trip the unwary. Remus knew them like ley-lines, like the spidery ink of a map he had once seen a traveller spread out on the table in the inn. Perhaps Sirius would care to know the trees, too? It could help him. Many heroes got lost in the woods, after all. If you didn’t know what to look for, one patch of green looked much like another. One trickling brook could lead you far, far astray. Remus dragged a hand along the girth of a twisted brittle-fingers, the way he did every time he walked this way, lost in thought.

Up ahead, a bush quivered. A deer picked her way through the foliage, before startling at the sight of Remus. Three more followed. That was one of the strange things about the wolf. Wolves had to eat, after all- surely her prey would have become scarcer over the years. But Remus had seen deer, rabbits and squirrels, all in numbers enough to notice in all the seasons of the year.

Wolves had to die, too. Yet this wolf, the great white she-wolf, endured without pause or alteration. Remus had found only one pawprint in all the years he’d been exploring; two days out from the full moon, in mud by a stream. He had been too scared to go back for weeks.

There was no sign of the wolf today, though. The moon was waning again, it would be almost a full cycle before the curse would come again. Remus felt strangely safe in the liquid cool of the trees. His roughspun trousers snagged a little on the underbrush, collecting the dew in dark spots around his calves. He followed his familiar trees to a place he had long regarded as his own. One of the muscular streams had shouldered through a bluff of rock, creating a series of tiny waterfalls and interlinking pools. A flattened boulder jutted out above the water. Remus sat there, legs dangling, enjoying the dappled sunlight and the quiet sounds. He stayed there for quite a long time.

But he was needed, as much as he ever was, and there was only so much he could think of when thinking of Sirius was somehow becoming a stronger influence, like wine over ale. That scared him a little. Such influence seemed instinctively dangerous to him. The horses would want watering. He scrambled down off his rock and walked back to the village.

Out by the barley fields, five children were playing. They skipped and raced one another back and forth, their feet kicking up dust. A song drifted over to where Remus walked, one he himself had heard as a child.

_Silver-mail, fish-scales,_

_He’s born beneath the sea._

_He’ll swim down all the rivers_

_Then he’ll soon come home to me._

_Silver-mail, fish-scales,_

_He’s lord beneath the sea._

_He’ll tax on all the minnows_

_Then he’ll soon come home to me._

“Sir!”

Remus stopped, looked over his shoulder. Tracking between the fields and the forest, Sirius was walking, shining in the afternoon light in his bright mail. The memory of his face, so creased and pored over, seemed a paltry reflection when confronted with a true gaze in pure eyes. Remus felt almost giddy to see it again. He faltered, then stopped. Sirius gained ground.

“You call me “sir”,” Remus said, when at last he was close enough to hear, “but you know my name.”

“I do.” Sirius came up beside him, leather-shod feet parting the long grass. He smiled as he corrected himself, a softness in that sharp face, a flash of teeth. “Remus.”

The children beside the field noticed him approach. They stopped, craning their necks, staring at the man in shining mail. Then they ran, giggling, the song starting up again, coming to see the stranger up close.

_Silver-mail, fish-scales,_

_He’s prince beneath the sea._

_He’ll dance the dance of oysters_

_Then he’ll soon come home to me._

Sirius seemed confused; Remus couldn’t help but feel a little wary. All the children in the village knew to be cautious of the orphan at the inn, the Lamb, the boy who came from the woods. Sometimes, they laughed at him, or they ran away when he came near. He couldn’t bear that in front of Sirius. But today, the lure of something new was a strong enough antidote to their suspicions and they went dancing before them, carrying the tune all the way down the track, back to the village.

_Silver-mail, fish-scales,_

_He’s king beneath the sea._

_He’ll sit a throne of pearl and stone_

_Before he comes home to me._

Remus shrugged; Sirius caught his eye. The pair of them followed.

When they reached the front of the inn, one of the mothers called anxiously. The children scattered. Remus watched them leave, all jumbled up with feelings inside. Sirius was still at his shoulder. A solid presence, tall and lean and _still_ the sun played upon the rings of his mail shirt, sparkling like running water.

“I am no prince,” Sirius began. “I don’t come from the sea, either.”

“It’s the mail shirt.” Remus was not well accustomed to conversation, but this was easy, far better than short exchanges with the innkeep and the occasional traveller. Sirius was interested in him, what he had to say. Remus could tell. “Most heroes don’t wear mail. They believe it will slow them down.” A woman had told him once that, when she had come to fetch her grey horse on the morning of the full moon. She had been dead the next morning.

“I’m no hero, either.” Sirius was smiling, though. He lifted his arms a little, as though noticing anew his fine garb. “Although it is better to be slower and alive, than fast and dead, in my experience.”

“I’ve never held a sword,” Remus blurted out. Sirius seemed surprised.

“Really? You’ve never been tempted to face the beast?”

Remus could not tell if Sirius thought him cowardly or not. “So, you _are_ here for the wolf, then.”

Sirius shook his head, caught, still smiling, so often smiling. “Yes, I am. But you are not?”

“I…” Remus faltered on the threshold of all that strangeness and found he could not cross it. He looked away.

“The innkeep told me the same as you.” Sirius filled the silence after only a moment. “None who have faced the beast have lived.”

“The wolf has been here as long as I can remember,” Remus told him. Then he scratched the back of his head awkwardly. “We all make do.”

Sirius appeared to stifle a smile- although not a true smile, there was something else polluting it- before he noticed Remus watching. “My apologies. I do not make light. Only, it amazes me what people are prepared to live with.”

Remus shrugged. “Suppose we have no choice?”

“You could leave.” Sirius said it instantly, quick as a cat after a speck of light.

“And go where?” Remus felt confused. The wide world was not open to those without gold, without horses and carts and maps and plans. The first true silence fell between them, a strange gulf.

There was a scuffling, an outbreak of high-pitched whispering. Then the children who had been called away (but who had clearly snuck straight back out again) came all the way up to Remus and Sirius where they stood, just beside the door to the inn.

“Where do you come from?” asked a boy.

Sirius blinked. Then he smiled, a mischievous smile. “I come from east of the sun and west of the moon, brave sir.”

A little girl stamped her foot. “That’s not a real place!”

“Oh?” Sirius arched an eyebrow, a rather exquisitely painful experience for Remus. “You sang of a king beneath the sea, bold hero. Why not a stranger from beyond the moon?”

This gave them all pause. Then the little boy pointed at Remus. “_He_ comes from the woods! Everyone knows.”

Remus stood very still, cold like a frost spreading up through his limbs. He could not have explained exactly why the accusation struck such fear into him. It was what all the villagers thought of him, after all, and for all he knew, they were right. But to have Sirius hear it, when he barely knew him, when this was all so fresh…

“The horses need watering,” Remus muttered, before turning on his heel and disappearing into the cool shade of the stables.

~

“Sit down,” the witch told him. Her cottage smelled strongly of sage and mint and woodsmoke; all the furniture seemed to have been grown, not made. Remus remembered the firepit and the pot-bellied kettle from his first visit, remembered the old leathery books, the dried bundles and the jars and the little round windows. He sat on the same bent-backed log where he had sat the first time he had come here. His feet were still bleeding, smearing the hearthstones. The witch did not appear to notice.

“Are you surprised?” Remus asked. His voice was dull. Golden light illuminated his dirty face.

The witch stood before him, peering down into his cupped hands. Their eyes met for an instant: Remus felt something cold scrape over his spine. Her eyes were so strange. If his were mudstone, then hers were the leaping spark and flicker of flame. To look in them was to know you were facing a being of bone-deep strangeness. Remus wondered if she felt the same way, looking back at him.

“No,” she replied. At last, she looked away: Remus breathed again. “I do not take petitioners, as a rule…”

“But you took me.”

Her gaze returned and he could not help the shiver that crawled over his skin, as though he had just been pushed into a snowbank. A faint smile pulled at her full lips.

“You, Remus Lupin, would have torn the very earth apart in seeking back what you have lost. How else could you have called to me? You sought to warp the laws that bind my kind surer than chains, though you did not know it. If any were to take a quest, it would have been you.”

_Seeking back what you have lost_. Remus once again pictured Sirius’ human face, an enduring habit, like picking at a scar. The objects in his hand, still glowing, flickered momentarily.

The witch smiled down at him, the fire in her eyes catching hold, burning, devouring. She stretched out her hands, so young and supple and clean.

“Now. Hand me that which you have carried all this way. And I will give you a way to return your love.”

On the threshold, Remus hesitated. “As you promised? Both hale, both whole?”

The witch’s face, now as young and beautiful as a fair maid on her wedding day, softened. The fire banked back down. “As I promised.”

Remus opened his fingers and offered all that he had up to her.

~

“So. You come from the forest.”

Sirius had found him in the twilight, out by the muck heap. Flies buzzed manically in the fading light. Remus was sweating and knew that he smelled, and he had, secretly, hoped that these things might shield him from the bright shininess of the stranger, but clearly that had not worked. Sirius stood before him, not flinching, his face curious but not repulsed. Remus dug the pitchfork into the rotting straw and leaned on it. What to say?

“Aye.” He decided that to lie would be foolish. After all, the whole village knew. Anyhow, it would gain nothing. Surely Sirius would not appreciated being deceived, no matter how feebly. But… he could find some ambiguity there. “At least, that’s what the villagers say.”

“You do not know?” Sirius sounded more than surprised- he was almost astonished. Remus shrugged. He felt deeply uncomfortable.

“My father never told me.”

“Your mother?”

“She died giving birth to me.”

Sirius frowned and was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “and you have no other family?”

Remus shrugged again. “Far as I know.”

Again, that frown. Remus got the sense that Sirius did not really pity him, which was at least welcome, but he also didn’t seem to really _understand_. He wondered where Sirius had come from, really come from. He decided to ask.

“What about your family?”

It was like stepping on grass that looked like grass, but was actually bog; the sensation of sinking, the sudden realisation of a bad misstep. Sirius looked away; it was such a small gesture, yet it conveyed a freezing, a history, a poor choice of conversation. Remus gripped the pitchfork handle hard, unable to work out how to retreat. But then-

“I told you. I come from east of the sun and west of the moon.” Sirius looked back at him, forcing a laugh. “Who else could my parents be?”

Remus tentatively straightened up. “Perhaps… the winds?”

“Indeed!” And the moment of tension was lost to Sirius’ bright smile. “And my brothers and sisters…”

Remus stared at him, unsure of what to say. Sirius’ grin grew wider.

“The stars, of course!”

They both laughed then. It was absurd, of course, but strangely charming. _My parents were the wind, my siblings the stars_. Remus finally stepped away from the muck heap.

“I ought to wash,” he explained. “Old Roger doesn’t like me coming in to eat when I’m not clean.”

“He keeps good rooms,” Sirius said, courteously, falling into step beside Remus as he headed to the water barrel. Remus rolled up his sleeves and unceremoniously dunked his head under the surface. This part of a summer day was one of the best: cooling, soothing, washing away the stinging sweat and dust of work. When he emerged, he noticed that Sirius was staring at him. Remus flushed- perhaps this wasn’t done where Sirius came from, perhaps they had baths drawn each night where they washed in genteel slowness. He quickly scrubbed his hands and forearms, then shook away the worst of the water.

“Have you eaten?” he asked. 

Sirius seemed to recover himself. “I have not. Would you share my table?”

Remus smiled again, truly. “I would like that.”

They shared bread and ale that night. They also shared words, many words, words that spilled everywhere and anywhere and carried a strange warmth like heat off a candle. Remus told him of the trees, and the forest, and the routes in his head. Sirius spoke of the road, of the long and weary miles that had brought him here. He had heard tell of the wolf in a city to the south. There, they had cobbled streets and people who scurried like ants back to the nest and a great wide river spanned by a red-brick bridge.

“In the darkness, they light candles around the market square. Each light is enclosed by coloured glass, so they glow like… like shards of a rainbow. It’s beautiful.”

Remus imagined it. Sirius’ eyes were coloured, too, this close up- a pale slate, water over sunlit stone. It was very interesting to look at.

“I’ve never been to a city,” Remus said.

“But, you know the woods. You know the trees.” Sirius took a swallow of ale. Then he fixed Remus with a clear-eyed stare. “Is it- as the children said? Is that why?”

“I told you, I don’t know,” Remus replied, instantly. Then he felt almost churlish. He relented a little. “Maybe. I have wondered- the cottage is closest to the trees, I suppose.” It was the furthest dwelling along the track that Remus had walked that morning, although of course it had been shuttered and quiet now that the full moon had passed, set apart from the other, lived-in buildings that made up their little village.

“Do you live there?” Sirius wanted to know. Remus shook his head.

“No. I have a cot in the hayloft here.” He did not feel like explaining about the full moon, about the iron lock on the door. He glanced through the open window, saw that dusk was finally fading to darkness. “And I should return there. The dawn comes faster than I’d like in summer.”

“Not an early riser, then?” Sirius seemed amused. That fanned the warmth in Remus’ chest something fierce. He was friendly. Perhaps even a _friend_.

“Not when I can help it.” He got to his feet. The villagers who drank there cast him strange looks, but tonight they could not touch him.

“Goodnight,” Sirius offered, courteously.

“Goodnight,” Remus replied. He walked away. Contrary to what he had just said, the dawn suddenly couldn’t hurry fast enough.

~

Three days later, Sirius carried his sword into the forest.

“Go on!” He was smiling. They were barely a hundred yards beneath the trees, stood in a tiny clearing hemmed in on all sides by fresh, slender silver-skins. The summer sun hid behind a cloud, but she was capricious today. Remus thought she’d be back. He eyed the hilt Sirius was extending towards him.

“What for?” he asked Sirius, his friend. The sun did as Remus expected and showed her face once more, filling the glade with patches of light, dappling the greenery, illuminating the steel. Sirius was once more wearing his mail shirt. Wariness kept him alert, tracking every small sound. Remus, by contrast, felt relaxed. But he did not know what to do with the sword.

“For fun, perhaps?” Sirius returned with a question. He was still smiling. “You may even find you have some skill.”

“I doubt that.”

Remus acquiesced though. It would please Sirius, it seemed, beyond mere amusement. The hilt felt unexpectedly heavy; Remus had always imagined swords as light and magically strong, the way they were talked about in stories. Parting flesh, parrying thrusts, saving and taking lives one stroke after another. He looked back at Sirius.

“Lift it,” Sirius encouraged. Remus did. He did not feel any different. Sirius, on the other hand, looked suddenly stricken.

“I’m not sure what you were expecting, but I’m no princess with the pea shoot,” Remus joked, when they still stood there, looking at one another. Sirius blinked.

“The princess and the pea shoot?”

“You didn’t hear that one then? When you were growing up?” Remus would have rather liked to give the sword back. He didn’t know what to do with it, after all. He awkwardly motioned with it. “Here, how about I tell it to you- if you’ll take this contraption off me.”

“_Contraption_,” Sirius echoed, but the frozen look had fallen off his face at last. “I see.” He pulled a mockery of a thoughtful face. “I suppose you make a noble offer.”

“Good story,” Remus nodded._ I’ll look much better telling that tale than I will swinging a sword like a fool._

“Very well!” Sirius took the sword, his fingers brushing up against Remus’s. “Shall we walk?”

“That depends if you remember the way.” Remus folded his arms and smiled. They had trodden the same path yesterday but had made further progress into the woods- he hoped Sirius would remember the guiding arms of the trees, and not suggest the rabbit tracks.

Sirius stood still and straight in the glad for a moment, sheathing the sword without even a careless thought, those cool eyes raking the impenetrable greenery that surrounded the little clearing. He was like a spear, Remus reflected, or a flag, a banner call, a sight to strike feeling into a heart.

“This way,” Sirius said, decisively. He set off in the right direction. “Come. Tell me of this princess!”

The inn was crowded that night, shutters thrown wide open to tempt in the last of the evening light, the scent of ale and mead weaving through a heady taste of summer’s waxing season. Remus was sat in a corner stool, his head resting against the wall behind him. A light breeze snuck through his hair every so often. Sirius was up at the bar, requesting another trencher. Remus had not eaten by himself, as had been his custom every night since he had started here, since the other man had arrived. It was strange. He was almost beginning to forget the silence of his hayloft, the gentle movement of the horses below. But looking at Sirius, he could not bring himself to miss it.

A group of people moved across his sightline, then merged at the bar. One clapped Sirius on the shoulder. Another glanced back to Remus, his eyes wary. Something heavy dropped into Remus’s stomach. He knew what would be said, what rumours would be spread, the old scandal dragged up in all its murky glory. _The boy from the woods. Don’t trust him. All our parents warned us about him._

Remus got up from his stool and left. His hayloft was waiting.

~

“He’s a horrible horse.”

Remus started. He was currying the chestnut, elbow at the ready to fend off snapping teeth. Sirius leant over the stable door and affectionately glared at the stallion. “Truly foul-tempered,” he continued. “I bought him for a pittance, but he’s carried me many miles.”

There was a silence. Then Remus turned to look at Sirius, his heart loud in his ears. He could see no point in dissembling or denying.

“You’re still here, then.”

Sirius’ expression quirked in confusion. “The wolf yet lives. I cannot leave until it is vanquished.”

“No- no, I meant, here. _Here_.” Remus gestured around at the straw, at the horse, at himself. “You still want to know me.”

“Oh.” Sirius’s expression cleared. The chestnut horse snaked his head at his master, forcing him to step sideways. “Have you time to walk with me? As we did yesterday?”

Remus stood, considering. The stallion tried to nip him, but he dodged.

“He really is a horrible horse,” he said. Then he stepped out of the stable, and together, he and Sirius walked towards the trees.

“In all my time in this world,” Sirius began, when at last they were among the shadows, “I have been told that I am not worthy of my place here.”

Remus could not think of a reply. It seemed utterly absurd. Sirius was everything a hero should be, everything the stories said, a prince in silver mail. Yet his face was drawn and thoughtful as they picked their way through the underbrush, and his eyes were hard like flint. What he said was clearly true.

“I am a stranger to my family,” Sirius continued. He was not looking at Remus. “I left their hall some years ago, and I will never return. I have sought a life of freedom and meaning in their place. Many of those I meet consider me unnatural, or strange, for the choices I have made, for the fate they think I suffer. But you do not.”

In the ensuing silence, Remus realised that Sirius was expecting him to speak. He chose his words as carefully as he could. “You are certainly strange to me. Unlike anyone I’ve met before. But I don’t fear you, and I don’t pity you. I- I think you are my friend.”

“I am.”

The two of them smiled, and Remus forgot his fear and his discomfort.

“So, you see,” Sirius resumed, still leading the way towards the twisted bitterbark, “I pay no heed to those here who would disparage you. I do not know them. I know you. You have helped me, and talked with me, and brought me joy. I would not choose to throw that away over history you cannot change.”

Remus found himself lost for words once more, only this time his mouth was filled with honeycomb, with sweetness, with something he’d never known before. _You’ve brought me joy_.

“I hope you will teach me more of the woods, and of yourself. If it would please you, we could take my horse along the road, and you could see a little more of what the world has to offer? I promise he is not so hideous to ride.”

Remus laughed then, and the sound startled a bird from the branches above. When the noise had died down, he looked to Sirius.

“I would like that.”

“Then that is what we will do.”

~

They set off at noon the next day. Remus had got permission from the innkeep, for the stables were quiet and they would only be gone a day and a night.

“Be careful. Back on time,” he had said. To Sirius: “I’ll still want paying for the room, if you want to keep it.”

“You have my word,” Sirius promised, then they went outside. The wind was breaking up the clouds high overhead, sun peeking through once more. The chestnut horse had been saddled and bridled. It was as fine a day as any for an adventure.

“Climb up behind me,” Sirius said. Remus did just that. It felt strange to be in such close proximity to someone. Or perhaps it was only strange because it was Sirius? He couldn’t be sure. They rode out of the village and down the road, the forest at their backs, the gentle hill of the sloping valley rising to meet them. The feeling of it was intoxicating.

“I understand now,” Remus said. He did not have to speak so loudly, too, not when he was mere inches from Sirius’s ear. “Why you travel.”

“Freedom,” Sirius replied, and oh, how he was right.

~

Remus made him stop when they finally reached the crest of the hill. He needed a moment simply to look, to drink it all in. Why had he not come here before? He did not know. Stretching out were bright green hills, lush, verdant, scattered with copses and great swathes of wildflowers. Between the hills ran rivers and silver streams, the white fog of waterfalls, black rocks and swimming waterbirds. He got down off the chestnut horse and stared at it all, starved and hungry and devouring all at once. This was the _world_. A world beyond the forest.

Behind him, he heard Sirius dismount, too.

“Would you like to ride in front?” he asked. Remus could not decline the offer. In front, he could see even more.

They rode until it was almost dark, until they were right beside a wide, shallow stream and a kind of tree Remus had never seen before.

“That’s a willow.” Sirius seemed delighted to be able to share some knowledge of trees at long last. “They only grow beside water.”

Remus watched the long, swaying leaves with fascination. They were so beautiful, so elegant, the tree almost human in its posture. He brushed his hand through the green curtain, wondering what was behind it.

“We can sleep inside, if you want,” Sirius told him. He was picketing the horse, who began to graze without further comment. “There’s always space beneath the trunk of a willow.”

And there was. After they had eaten and washed their faces in the stream, Sirius ducked through the leaves and Remus followed. Beneath the stooped trunk, a small space was open, filled with grey light and blanketed with a few fallen leaves and soft summer ground. It seemed to Remus that there had never been a more agreeable place to sleep in the whole world.

But when they laid down, Remus found that his whole body was awake. Sirius was barely a foot away. His breathing was loud enough to hear. The grey light was sufficient to pick out his shape, the lines of his profile, the blacker shadow of his hair. Warmth pooled in Remus every time he looked.

_Desire_, he realised, _this is desire_.

He did not know what to do with it. Was it wrong to desire Sirius? He supposed it was if Sirius did not desire him in return. And Sirius was plainly not lying awake in silent strictures. Sirius was a man of the world, who had seen many things and met many people. He would not lose his heart in a matter of mere days. Remus ought to wait, that was the thing to do. He would wait and see if Sirius made any motions towards that end. That there had never been anyone else who had stirred such a response in Remus meant nothing, surely? This was only a strange happenstance, and it would not be helped by Remus rushing things.

_You’ve brought me joy._

Remus sighed deeply and rolled over, so that he could look on Sirius no longer. _It won’t help_, he told himself, and eventually found sleep.


	2. Blue Moon

“You will need,” the witch had said, “three things.”

Remus had looked up from where he knelt on the packed earth. “Tell me.”

She had smiled then. “A skein of thread from the blanket that first swaddled the one you seek. The tears of a blue moon. And the feather of a rising phoenix. These things I will need to return your love to you.”

Remus’s heart, numb and shrivelled as it was, dropped through his chest. He stared up at the witch, lost for words. Where could he possibly begin?

“I warned you,” the witch said, in a soft voice, “that it would not be easy.”

Remus bowed his head.

“But, I will help you, at least to find the start of your road.” The witch knelt down before him, her rust coloured dress folding around her, hair escaping from the bun she wore. “Travel three days east from here, to the edge of the forest. Follow the road alongside the river until you come to a town. Ask folk there. Ask for the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.”

Remus had caught her eyes then, experiencing the discomfort like the scraping edge of a knife. “A skein of swaddling clothes. The tears of a blue moon. The feather of a rising phoenix.”

“Return here when you have all three.” The witch stood tall again and offered a hand to help him rise. He took it. “Remember. The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.”

Remus had remembered. He branded the witch’s words inside him in burning letters, he whispered them to himself as he walked east through the forest, he kept them as close as a sword or lantern in the darkness of the night, when strange creatures made fell sounds and the cold crept into his bones. _A skein of swaddling clothes. The tears of a blue moon. The feather of a rising phoenix_. The witch’s instructions were surely leading him towards the first quest, the swaddling clothes, _Sirius’s_ swaddling clothes, and, with that, the family he had left behind. The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Remus thought about it a lot as he travelled. Sirius. Sirius _Black_. The name he had walked away from, the halls he had denounced. What would he find, there in the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black?

At the end of the third day, Remus met the edge of the trees. A great fertile plain stretched away into the twilight. At the very edge of sight, huge grey masses loomed up towards the horizon, jagged and awesome, even at this distance. Remus realised that they must be mountains. He spent a while simply looking at them as the dusk came down, the river making quiet sounds against the steep-sided bank. Eventually, it grew dark. He went to sleep with his back to the forest, and the next day he followed the road beside the water.

Some days later, he came upon a town. The mountains had grown larger with every mile he’d covered and they were now impossibly tall, impossibly huge, rocky and many coloured, all garbed green and purple and snowy white. They were extraordinarily different to anything Remus had known before. Even the town itself was strange and new. The buildings were all made of grey stone, not wood, and there were few tended fields. Instead, flocks of sheep and hairy cattle picked over the foothills, shepherded by lads and lasses and lithe-limbed dogs. Remus drank it all in. Then he found the inn and waited for it to fill. He needed the right person to ask.

“Not from round here, are you?” A woman stopped beside his table, long red hair falling in her eyes. Remus thought she had a kind face. He shook his head.

“No. I’m from far away.”

“Oh, you even sound different!” Her eyes were laughing eyes, already marked with lines despite her young age. Remus smiled back at her.

“You sound different to me, too.”

“Suppose I do, don’t I!” The woman sat down on the other stool, her expression full of curiosity. “Tell me your name, stranger from far away.”

“I’m Remus,” Remus said.

“I’m Lily. What brings you here, Remus from far away?” She smiled wider at him, Lily with the kind face and the laughing eyes. Remus decided to ask.

“I’m here looking for the Noble and the Most Ancient House of Black.”

When he looked at Lily, she wasn’t smiling anymore. If anything, she seemed stricken. Her next words almost froze Remus solid. She leaned forward, her shoulders bunched, her knuckles suddenly white.

“Do you know something about Sirius?”

~

Lily had been a part of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black since her sixth summer, when her parents could no longer afford to feed two children. She had worked every day since, part of the small army who maintained their master’s elevated existence. They were not supposed to mix with the Black children, but children were hard to contain. Lily had known Sirius since he was a boy. They had played together, argued together, laughed and cried together. She had known him until the day he was found missing from his bed chamber, the day he vanished from the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black forever. That was three summers ago. She wept to hear Remus’s tale. And then she promised to help.

He slept that night on the floor of her cottage, and in the morning her husband James rounded up three shaggy ponies from the fell. Marriage had saved Lily from the House of Black. She and her husband worked a patch of land that James had inherited, keeping hardy livestock and raising what few crops would take to the peaty soil. It was hard, but it was honest. They were beholden to no one. It reminded Remus of home.

They rode out of the town, up the slope to the mountains. Lily told him much and more of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Of their cruelty, of their arrogance, of their basal pride. Of their cold and draughty hall, warrened with half-a-hundred stone passageways, lit by giant fireplaces large enough to swallow a man, trunk-thick walls strewn with silver and dusty green velvet. Of the quiet ways over the moat and into the towers, of the winding staircases, of the attics filled with relics of ages past. Remus listened to it all, dread building within him. This was where Sirius had come from. This was where Sirius had _run_ from. What if this place devoured him, too?

But they had reached the towering walls that guarded the Halls of Black, the same dark grey stone as that of the great crag that loomed up behind the house to the north. The place seemed impenetrable.

“I can still come in with you,” Lily offered. Her face was miserable.

“No,” Remus said. “I cannot risk cheating the witch.” He was deathly afraid of losing Sirius over some twist in a riddle, a sting in the wording. She had meant it to be him, and him alone. Lily’s offer had given him some courage, though. James offered him a short, sharp dirk.

“Just in case,” he said.

Remus jumped off his shaggy pony, crossed the dry moat and climbed the wall. There was no going back now.

He saw the headstones first. Lily had warned him that the Blacks buried their dead on their own land, and that the graveyard would be the safest place to climb the wall, but he still found it disquieting. He could not read but he suspected that Sirius’ name was inscribed on one of the fresher looking markers. Dead, buried, forgotten.

_He’s as good as all those, now_, Remus thought, and he snuck out of the graveyard to the lower turret door. Night was drawing in. He would have to be fast.

The tower was filled with vicious gusts of cold air. They swirled around Remus like suspicious dogs, sniffing his heels, growling through the narrow gaps in the walls and beside the sharp-edged windows. No torches were lit. It was dark and cold and Remus felt fear settle into his heart like thick fog.

“Who’s there?”

Remus flinched all over and wrenched the dirk from his belt. The croaking voice had come from the shadowy stairwell. There were shuffling footsteps, and a twisted figure came into view.

“Who’s there?” It demanded. Remus held the dirk out in front of him.

“Don’t come any closer.” He had not even though to lie- deception wasn’t in him in that chill, empty space.

The man shuffled forward, then lifted his head. He was wizened like a winter apple and almost completely bald. Remus could not see his eyes. They were all but hidden by drooping hoods of flesh.

“Who are you?”

Remus swallowed. “I am here for Sirius Black.” Perhaps he meant to say, I am here _because_ of Sirius Black, but that didn’t seem quite right, not now in the cold and the shadows. In some way, it really felt as though he were retrieving Sirius from the halls that had tried to poison him, riding in on a white charger to sweep his memory away from those who would seek to defile or obliterate it. One skein of thread.

The man stopped in his tracks. Shock peered out from behind the veil of age. He stared at Remus like he was an apparition. “Where did you hear that name?”

“I know him.” Remus said, truthfully.

The man squinted at him. Remus could not tell if he was afraid.

“He’s dead. Years and years he’s been dead. There’s a stone out there for him. Old Kreacher remembers, see?”

“He’s alive,” Remus whispered. It was loud enough in the eerie silence of the stairwell. “He didn’t die. He ran away.” It felt odd to be saying those words of Sirius, a man who had never seemed inclined to run from anything. But Remus felt in his bones that it was true.

“So what if he did?” The old man was sneering, suddenly entwined in memories that Remus could not see. “He was wicked. Feckless. Never cared properly for where he came from. Not like his brother. Oh, he was a proper son, a proper Black. _Sirius_ should have died, not Regulus…”

“Let me past,” Remus said. He felt sick with this place, sick with fear and horror, sick with all this knowing. Lily had spoken of Regulus. He was dead. Sirius was not. Remus just had to get him back.

“To do what?” Old Kreacher glared at him. Perhaps he knew that he could not stop Remus, even if he tried.

Remus took a step forward. The dirk no longer shook in his hand. “To bring Sirius home.”

It was the truth again, he could taste it in his mouth, the metallic tang of hope. _If home could be anywhere, it would be with you._

Old Kreacher looked suddenly lost. A change had come in his craggy face, as sudden as the weather. He peered at Remus as though with new eyes. “What? Who are you?”

Remus stood there for a heartbeat, staring back. Then he ducked his head. He sheathed the dirk.

“Nobody,” he said, and moved past the old man, up the staircase.

The tower room was filled with dust and memories so thick you could nearly swallow them whole. Remus had never been somewhere quite like it. Old things did not stay old where he came from, not when they were used, and they usually were. They were repaired, repainted, patched up and passed to new hands. Nothing really died completely; just absorbed into something else. But here, things were left. Preserved. Decorated with cobwebs, not whitewash. The last eking of the day snuck through the narrow windows and Remus moved through the grey light, eyes wide, shoulders hunched. He was looking for a flash of red.

Lily had told him that Sirius was wrapped in red swaddling clothes when he was born. His wet-nurse had told him that, one of the few scraps of his early childhood he had to hold onto, and so he had told everyone else, over and over again. Remus was looking for red.

Beneath an old silver goblet, he found them. He tore off a skein and wound it into a loop and then ran from the tower like a hare before a dog, right back out to the wall and over the moat. Lily and James were waiting for him.

“Go,” Remus told them, his heart drumming with the strength of thunder. “I have it. Go.”

They left the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black crouched up against the crag; left it forever; left it at the mercy of the looming shadows of the night to come.

~

It rained the morning they rode back to the inn. Remus had been woken by the willow crying clean tears onto his upturned face, and for a moment he had forgotten the previous night, forgotten the joy and the understanding and the quiet restraining of his headstrong feelings. Then he had remembered. He tried to focus on the cool earth beneath his head, the insistent dripping to the left of his nose. Those things were real, after all. The other thing was not. But then Sirius had woken up, and Remus had to look at him again, and he could _feel_ all of it again, in his heart and back and groin. The wanting. He hoped Sirius could not see it, too.

They rode back in comparative silence. Remus tried to blame it on the rain. The water came between them and swam in the air and drenched their cloaks and it was just the rain, rain, rain. That was all. A hairsbreadth existed between them and it held them still, together yet apart. At least, that was how it felt to Remus. He did not care to ask Sirius of his opinion. The landscape furled back up again beneath the hooves of the copper-coloured horse like a roll of cloth, grass and rock and tree following the soft sound of hoofbeats. Remus wondered if he would ever see it again.

Back at the inn, he dug out all the stalls and scrubbed the troughs clean as the rain cleared overhead. The aching madness abated slightly, and he found that when he and Sirius met for bread and ale that evening, he could bear it better, speak with their usual ease. Nonetheless, he did not stay so late. He did not look back when he left into the dusk, and so he did not see Sirius staring after him, his eyes curious, his brows drawn, the subtle signs of wanting drawn around the set of his mouth.

It did not take long after that.

The next day they walked into the woods again. Remus found himself preoccupied by the sway of Sirius’ shoulders beneath his mail shirt, the way his hand would wrap around the hilt of a sword, the brush of his raven hair, and in the scent of green and honeysuckle madness, he took the lead. Why should he not go after this man? Waiting seemed absurd in the dappled sunlight, in the covering shade, in gaze of those strange and depthless eyes. The caution that had so restrained him beneath the silver tresses of the willow peeled back and dissolved. He took the lead. They walked in single file to the dell that Remus thought of as his own.

The streams sang when first they kissed. Remus, who had never kissed anyone before, found it strangely easy. It had been like facing danger to begin with, but then it was more like riding, or dancing, or singing and listening for a reply. It was like these things, but not, because it was Sirius, the taste of Sirius, the feel of Sirius, and Remus’s heart was beating so hard that his whole chest was moving.

They kissed for a long time. Then they simply looked at one another, the sun now high in the sky.

Sirius seemed different, Remus thought. A little of the sharpness had been washed away from his face, from the angles of his body. When he smiled, it was sweeter, more private, briefer- but oh, it warmed Remus’s heart. Had he been able to see it, he would have noted the glimmering depths of his own mudstone eyes and been both surprised and emboldened. Brown skin, brown hair, browner eyes; never had it looked so well on him as it did in the eyes of a lover, in the gaze of a hero from the winding road.

“I find I am well received,” Sirius said, and Remus laughed quietly, his heart taking flight.

“Aye. You are.”

“And I am well pleased,” Sirius added. His slender fingers covered Remus’ own. His voice was the closest to cautious as Remus had ever heard it. “I am content.” He laid a strange little caress on the final word. Then he stared intently at Remus. “Are you?”

“What do you mean?” Remus had thought it must be obvious, but perhaps it was not. He wanted to make his intent quite plain: it was to stay here, in the high summer of his life, for as long as possible. To crown Sirius his king of love and beauty with a garland of honeysuckle, to ride endlessly at his side into the rosy dusk under the shadow of the horizon.

Sirius looked away. “My apologies. I shall speak clearly. I fancy that you are the only man to have ever met me as I was and taken delight in it. You are blunt, but not coarse; you are fairer than any snow-hearted maiden; you give me joy in laughter and courage in the darkness. I would love you the way the birds serenade the coming of the morning light, I would love you beyond thought or reason or insurmountable distance. It has been merely days, but I know it to be so. And I am content. How do you find this answer?”

The sunshine continued to pour down around them, a quiet breeze creating a swaying waltz between the light and the shade. The waterfalls hummed their incomprehensible songs. Remus breathed, and his heart beat, and he knew all this with a lancing clarity, as though it had been sketched out with quill and ink. He looked at Sirius.

“Aye. I am content.” He paused. “I am as content as you, I do believe.”

“That is well,” Sirius said, for that was all that was left to say.

“I suppose we could return to kissing.” Remus felt like fool for saying it, but he was too eager to remain silent, and anyway, Sirius smiled and then they had kissed again, long and sweet and it only seemed to get easier. They were, after all, content.

When they walked back through the forest, much later, Remus was aching with desire yet still suspended on the thread of unspeakable joy, and he suddenly remembered that they were going back to other people who might notice and remark on what had clearly passed between the two of them. He halted.

“What do we say to people?” He flushed. “I have never done this before.”

“Do any have a prior claim on your heart or hand?” Sirius wanted to know. He sounded neither afraid, nor resigned. On the contrary, it was plain his certainty was implacable. He would relinquish Remus for no one- and this was reassuring, for Remus felt much the same way.

“No.” He shook his head.

“Then we shall say as much as is needed. I would court you, if you would have me.” He reached out his hand and Remus took it.

“Of course I’ll have you,” he chided, and Sirius laughed, a silvery, liquid thing. They walked on. And it was as they said.

The next morning, Sirius joined Remus in cleaning the stables. He said it was important to humble himself, to show that he was not afraid of hard work. Remus believed him, even after they’d stepped into the shade behind the doorway and kissed until the ground could have fallen away beneath them. The copper-coloured horse glared at them, but passed no comment. The stables got cleaned.

Remus found wild sweetberries, and he unlocked the house for the first time in months to find a basket to put them in. Sirius claimed he had never tasted them before; he made faces whenever one was particularly tart. Remus laughed. He was kissed for that, too. In the swollen spaces of burning sensation, Remus realised that now his hands ached to touch Sirius in ways far beyond comfort or retribution. At night, he dreamed of the feel of his skin. They drew looks from the villagers but he cared less and less. He had almost forgotten that he had once been called The Lamb.

A haze descended upon the valley. It was very hot. Flies buzzed with indecent enthusiasm through the sluggish, stagnant days. Remus laboured through it and felt the weight of Sirius’s eyes whenever he stretched or washed in the water barrel. It gave him an idea.

Back in the woods, the water in the deep pools was cool and blue and green and made their feet sting with relief when they dangled their legs over the sides. Remus pulled his shirt over his head. He felt bold, heady. Afraid, too, but he had known fear for many long years now and it meant little and less in that moment. He wondered what Sirius thought of his body, of its colour, of its mild lopsidedness and hard muscles from working the pitchfork, wondered if he wanted the way Remus wanted, with dreams of skin and hands that hungered. He decided that it was time to find out. With one motion, he slithered down into the water and pulled Sirius in alongside him.

Remus had never learned to swim, but this pool was shallow enough to stand in with his shoulders above water. Sirius ducked under the surface, laughing, hair and shirt suddenly plastered to the fine outlines of his form. It was shockingly cold and the rocks dug into the soles of his feet and Remus could hardly breathe at all. He clumsily held out his arms.

The feeling of Sirius was better than he could have imagined. They were both shaking, maybe the cold, maybe from one another and it felt like feasting and starving all at once. Sirius’ skin was slick from the water, but Remus could feel the heat from it rise to meet his own palms, the friction from his shirt, the growing familiarity of his mouth. Their legs entwined. Pleasure rose up and flooded through him with every press and closer sigh. They stayed in the water for a long time, growing closer, closer.

Ever after, Remus would find that the memories of what they discovered together that day in the pool swirled between them like a mysterious elixir, forever defining and divining more of what they were meant for, of the boundaries they would press and test, of the ways and forms they could fit in and around one another. Relief only stoked more yearning. Remus felt what they had done in every gesture and breath they shared, united and apart. It was how he imagined learning to read might be: new worlds opened up, a new language to wrap around the things you saw and make sense of it all. He wanted to _learn_ Sirius. He wanted that very badly.

That night, under a swelling bevy of storm clouds, the door of the inn creaked very quietly. Remus, who had been lying awake, nearly boiling over, heard footsteps on his ladder. Even in the dark, he could see Sirius’s head emerging over the rim of the hayloft.

“Would you send me away?” Sirius asked, softly. Remus was already reaching for him, and thus did not answer. He did not need to. Much could be said that did not require words.

Remus learned a great deal of what could be said over the next few days. He wondered that others could not see it on him, this new and beautiful discovery. He could see it on Sirius, after all, that connection twixt the pair of them that now bound and suffused every moment. Sirius seemed to him like some detailed and exquisite tapestry; he wanted to gaze at him, to see the back and know the weave, to wrap himself in him like a blanket, surrounded by a record, by a piece of art. He knew that such deep knowledge was surely impossible but he strived for it all the same. Sirius strived right back. Those were days of beautiful balance, of sweat and fire and a divine kind of hunger. They were barely out of one another’s sight.

Six days later, it rained. Sirius was laid on Remus’s chest in the hayloft and they could smell the grass sighing with sweet relief under the plashing water outside. The scent was like a draught to Remus. It cleared his head. For a moment, the fever lifted. He turned his gaze to Sirius.

“Shall you still face the wolf?”

Sirius became still against him. A hand gripped Remus’s hip- earnest, stern.

“I must. A poor courtier I would make if I were to leave you to this scourge.”

He was making light, but Remus did not feel it. He rested a hand on Sirius’s shoulder, and he meant it as an anchor, an invisible kind of tether.

“We’ve gone on this long. There is no hurry.”

“And you need go on no longer. Surely you do not doubt me as you once did? For you did not know me then.” Sirius twisted on his chest to look at Remus, his face filled with love, determination and mild rebuke. “You did not know my resolve.”

Remus felt his heart crack open once more, heat flooding through him like a fire on a winter’s day. He could smell the grass only faintly. Sirius was here; the wolf far away. So could they remain. It was a childish fantasy, but he found he did not care.

“No,” he murmured, “I did not.”

Sirius seemed pacified. “I would defend you from every threat between here and the glittering sea,” he said, in the way he had of spinning words out like thread from a spindle, like a craftsman who took delight in observing his own work. “With sword and shield and fearless heart I would do it. You have burned all terror from my heart, Remus.”

Remus smiled fondly at him. “Aye. And I would do the same for you. Sword, shield and all the rest of it.”

“That is well,” Sirius sighed.

It was. But, sadly, it wasn’t enough.

~

Remus left Lily in the dawn light, his feet turned to the north. A man had once come to the village, saying that he had been to a mountain lake where the moon came down to touch the earth, where her tears froze the ground they fell upon. That was what Lily had said. It was good enough for Remus. The witch had set him on his path; it would not be easy, but it would be possible. He had to believe so. He waved goodbye and walked. The skein of red thread was spooled in his pocket, tucked close to his heart.

He walked. He walked for many days. He walked until his shoes began to wear through and he could find no cobbler to mend them, he walked until he lived only off the land, scavenging from mile to endless mile in search of anything to eat. The mountains rose up around him, swallowing him whole. The roads ran out beneath his feet. He felt himself grow thin and hollow, worse than any of the worst winters beneath the reign of the wolf. He did not stop. He walked.

It snowed. Remus had never seen snow quite like this: thick, creamy, good enough to eat. He opened his mouth to taste it. He was shivering. Night was closing in. He thought of Sirius, and instead of hope, pain lanced through his heart. He would fall and fail. The cold would devour him before morning could come. He was going to fail his love.

He was on his knees before he knew it. He found no voice to cry with. He simply waited, feeling the sharpness in the teeth of the storm.

_Sirius Sirius Sirius Sirius Sirius Sirius Sirius Sirius Sirius_-

Something hit him, hard, in the shoulder. He toppled over into the thick snow. A muffled sort of crunch sounded close by.

“I- what?”

A stranger’s voice. There was the hiss and strike of a flint. A bundled-up face peered down at Remus’s prone figure, small eyes watering. They stared at him, then they looked away, down the steep slope. Remus tried to speak.

“Alive!” The small man started. “He’s alive. You’re alive! Come on, get up, it’s not far!”

He plucked at Remus’s threadbare cloak. When this did little and less, he pulled on his arm.

“Up! Get up.”

_Sirius_. Remus closed his eyes. He was beginning to feel warm.

“No, no,” the stranger was muttering, and he tapped Remus’s cheek sharply, as though in reprimand.

_Sirius. For Sirius._

Remus opened his eyes. He shuddered again, more violently. Then he staggered to his feet. He leant on the stranger, whose name was Peter, and together they stumbled forward, through the storm.

Peter kept a cottage up on the side of the mountain for the summer months, to keep his goats and spin their wool when they were sheared in spring. Storms like the one that howled outside were not unusual.

“_You_ are though,” Peter told him, handing him a third helping of stew, “unusual, I mean. Very unusual. Nobody but me comes up here.” His nose twitched. He had a hurried way of speaking, as though each word were trying to shoulder the others out of the way to gain the most attention. His eyes still watered in the cramped, warm cottage. Remus looked at him. Sleep was tugging at his sleeve, weighing heavy across his shoulders, but the man had just saved his life. A debt of thanks was owed. He swallowed another mouthful and reached for words.

“My name is Remus.” It was worse than he had expected. It had been so long since he had had occasion to speak to anyone that his voice was cracked and strained, barely loud enough to hear above the wailing of the wind. “I am searching for a lake.”

“A lake?” Peter’s face twisted in confusion. “These mountains are riddled with them. Why-?”

“A lake where the moon comes down to touch the earth,” Remus whispered. It came easier than true speech. “Where her tears freeze the ground beneath her feet.”

Peter became very still. Then he hid himself for a few moments, piling peat upon the fire to feed the smoky blaze. But he could not hide forever.

“It’s very dangerous to go there,” he said, when Remus’s gaze would not leave him alone, “very, very dangerous. It’s not meant for men. I’m not supposed to show anybody up there.”

Remus half-leapt up from his seat. “You know the way?”

“Y-yes.” Peter seemed scared. “B-but-”

“You must take me.” Remus stood all the way up, his head just brushing the low ceiling. The wind seemed to laugh in derision. The fire guttered.

“No.” Peter backed away a few steps, but resolution had come to rest in his lower lip, hardening behind his rapidly blinking eyes. His small hands came up between them. But before Remus could step forward, he added, “not now. The storm is too strong. And- I’ve heard she won’t come down unless it’s a clear night. And you have good cause to request an audience.”

A good cause? Remus did not know. It was neither good nor bad. It was a necessity. Sleep tugged at him again, a rising tide. He sank back down into the chair.

“I do,” he mumbled, but he could no longer rage nor fight. He would rest. “But as you say…”

“Good, good.” Peter said more, but Remus did not hear it. He was deep, deep asleep.

~

“I’d be careful, if I was you.”

Remus was full of mead and ideas for when Sirius would join him in his loft later that night, and at first, he did not realise that the man’s words were meant for him. He continued to lean against the water butt outside the inn and drink in the night air.

“I _said_-” something hit the back of Remus’s neck, perhaps a pebble, thrown from a careless fist, “- I’d be careful, if I was you.”

Remus looked up. There were three of them, his age or a little older, looking at him the way he had always been looked at: derision, fear. He stood up slowly.

“Why’s that.” He did not really ask, but he knew how it would play out. They would lay in with fists if he didn’t play along, and the idea of Sirius- who was tending to his armour upstairs- finding him in such a state sent a flush of shame straight through him. No. He would hear their words, and he would ignore them, for they were only words.

“You’re walking out with a dead man.”

“The wolf’ll get him.”

“Yeah, _your_ wolf’ll get him, won’t she?”

“Rip his throat out-”

Remus was ramming them with his shoulder before they could even raise their fists. Blood roared in his ears. They grabbed at him and held him between them and hit him hard enough to split his lip. Pain ricocheted through him, merging with the rage. Remus had not fought anyone in long years. He braced his legs to the floor and wrenched free. He hit two of them, kicked the third. There were shouts from the inn behind them. Then there was a flash of silver.

“Step back.”

Sirius stood in their midst. He was a pale, glowing thing, tall and dangerous, and the sight of him was like a banner call to Remus’s heart. He came to stand beside him as Sirius raised his sword.

“Who drew first blood?” the innkeep demanded.

Remus turned to look at him. His face was bleeding and his body ached and yet- he had never felt so powerful. He was not alone. “I did.”

“For _why_, boy?” the innkeep sounded exasperated. Remus’s assailants were backing away, seeking shelter within the small crowd now gathered in the evening air.

Remus drew himself up, swiping a hand against his bloody lip. The old words and laws came back to him as the haze of rage receded slightly. “Insult was given.”

By his side, Sirius shuddered with barely bridled fury. At first, Remus wondered if he could not speak, or if he would not, but then the hero sheathed his sword, his eyes burning.

“I warn any bearing grudge or grievance; I will not show lenience. A slight against Remus shall be taken as a slight against me.”

The innkeep stared at the two of them. “Is that the way of it?”

“It is.”

There was an outbreak of muttering, much like a swift wind through night-time trees, but without the promise of further violence or retribution, there was little reason for the onlookers to stay. In a handful of moments, Remus and Sirius stood alone outside the inn, far beneath the shifting clouds that seemed eager to smother the last of the sunset.

Sirius reached a hand upwards and brushed his thumb carefully over the split in Remus’s lip. His eyes were still blazing, but his touch was very gentle. “Did they do you great injury?”

Remus shrugged. His head throbbed from a hammer-blow of a fist, but he had suffered worse. He would suffer anything for this, to have Sirius stand by his side like a partner or an equal, like they were king and regent, unstoppable and unbreakable.

“Come,” Sirius murmured, “I will tend your wounds.”

Remus sat on a bale with his torso bared as Sirius soaked clean cloths in water from the butt and wiped away the blood. In the skies above, the stars were beginning to emerge. The twinned sting of pain and relief that blossomed from Sirius’s ministrations sang through Remus’s body until he felt almost light-headed. They had stood together. Sirius had chosen to defend him. And now he was soothing his hurts with- Remus suddenly noticed- trembling hands.

“Sirius?” He asked. His speech was a little thickened, so he entwined their fingers to make his meaning plain. Sirius became still once again. Remus could feel the tremors quietly shivering over his whole body.

“I have confronted many foul things,” Sirius whispered, when he had found his tongue once more, “deep darkness and rampant fears. But none have quelled my heart as this has. I could not lose you, Remus. Not for anything.”

A great silence came upon them. The moon, half-full and ever swelling, peered down at them from her silver seat. A great chorus of emotion manifested in the press of their palms, in the quiet spaces between their mingling breaths. Such a truth… Remus marvelled at it. That it was true, that it had come into being, that it could be shared so completely by two distinct people. For he could no more lose Sirius than he could lose his own heart.

“Aye,” he replied, when at last words felt welcomed once more. He had no great speeches, but he tried, for Sirius. “If home could be anywhere, it would be with you.”

Sirius smiled. At last, the trembling seemed to recede. “I should kiss you, but it would cause you pain.”

Remus managed a lopsided grin. “I know.”

“What insult did they offer?” Sirius flexed his fingers and dropped Remus’s hand, reaching for the cloth once more. “I did not see the start of the matter.”

A rock fell into Remus’s stomach. He did not want to say; did not want to bring the wolf back into the space between them, the spectre of danger and death so opposed to all that had just been said. But he could not lie. A kind of madness seized him. Perhaps he hoped to dissuade Sirius from his hunt, else convince him that the beast did not need to die for Remus to live a full and joyful life at his side, but he decided to lay out the whole truth, as best he knew it.

“There have always been rumours. ‘Bout me and the wolf.” It felt absurd to be telling this strange and sorry tale with a lisp and a bare chest, but it would not be told otherwise. Remus looked all the while at Sirius. He was determined to do at least that. “The villagers say I came out of the forest as a babe in arms. My mother was dead. Once, there was a witch living in the woods, but she was never heard of again after I was born. And the next full moon, there was the wolf. She killed the innkeep’s brother, that first time.

“The boys in the village all grew up with me as the enemy. I had no name ‘til I was ten. My father called me “the Lamb”. I’ve always been strange. Set apart. The wolf has lived as long as I have, uncommonly long for a wolf, or so everyone says. She never seems to eat other than at the full moon. I think-” and now Remus said the words that he had never voiced aloud to anyone before, the words that seemed to wrap around his fate and doom all at once, “- I think she’s waiting for me.”

He could hear his own heart in his ears. Sharing his burden had left his mouth dry, his skin flushed. It made it real, somehow, far more real than mere thought or speculation. The wolf was here for him. He knew it, knew it in his skin, in his bones. She would never leave until she had taken him, too. He was tainted with the blood shed on the full moon. What would Sirius say, know that he knew of that taint?

An owl hooted, far away in the night.

Sirius’s face changed imperceptibly. Remus could not say what had shifted, but then Sirius sank to one knee.

“You think to drive me away,” Sirius murmured, his hand finding Remus’s and holding it surely, “you think that this tale will dissuade me from my course. But it is not so. I have heard much of your history from “concerned” fellows, from fetid gossip that has been poured into my ears. I care not a whit for it. I know you, and your good heart. So- an accident of your birth has laid a curse upon you.” Sirius’s mouth quirked into a wry smile. “I know something of that. I love you. It is my privilege to lift any burden from your shoulders, as you have lifted mine own burdens. I asked you once before, and I ask you again. Remus, do you doubt me?”

Remus did not answer. Instead he kissed Sirius like an all-consuming fire, oblivious to the pain, chasing out his fears with stinging smoke and roaring flame, until everything but the present moment wilted in the face of the blaze.

There were five days to the full moon.

~

Peter showed him the way up the mountain when the storm blew itself out, three days later. Remus could not pretend that the enforced respite had not been welcome. He had eaten plainly, but well. He had slept and been warm. Peter had been generous and kind-hearted, and had listened to Remus’s tale with his mouth half open. He was a strange man, deliberately and happily lonely with the empty slopes and his hardy herd of goats; full of stuttering chatter; endlessly concerned and gentle with it. Remus found that after a mere three days, he was fond of this chance companion. And the harshness of the road was laid bare before him once again, starkly painful after the softness of woollen blankets and the heat of a peat fire. Still, he was close. The moon’s blue tears were within his grasp. When he stepped out onto a crisp layer of snow in his freshly repaired boots, he felt his heart leap. He was so close.

He bade Peter farewell and began walking again, his footprints leaving a message on the ground like a trailing line on some great, white map. The lake was beyond that peak. The full moon was tonight. _Sirius_. He was _so close_.

The sun came out and caressed her warmth over the jagged, rocky slopes, and soon the snow underfoot was melting away, leaving hastily to gush down merry streams back into the valley. Remus felt himself grow warm again. All that Peter had told him swirled in his head: of the moon’s curiosity, of her imperiousness, of her strange, vaunted wisdom. _I walked across the world for an audience with the moon._ He imagined telling the innkeep back at home. He almost laughed.

The day was waning away as Remus finally crested the peak of the mountain and came upon the fabled lake. Glassy water seemed to stretch away as far as the eye could see, pearly blue beneath the evening sky, endless and unfathomable. The air was growing a little colder. It would be a clear night. A clear night for a blue moon. Remus left his pack by the shore and took off his boots. Peter had told him what to do. Now, he had to wait for darkness.

It came almost suddenly. The sweet skies of sunset died away; the shades of night were drawn in their place. A deep gloom smothered the mountaintop. But then- bright-burning stars flared into being in the vast beyond, reflected perfectly in the still water. No breeze dared disturb the scene. It was a sight fit for kings.

The moon rose steadily in the sky, pale and shining, and Remus barely dared to look. The lake seemed to glow as bright as day, a glorious imitation, an exultant chorus of blinding light, all in honour of its lady. Remus found that he was trembling. But he would not turn back now. He gathered his wits and courage tight to him, and stepped into the water.

A brief pause. The air was silent, yet ringing, as though with the faint echoes of a brewing storm.

“Who are you?”

The voice- the voice of the moon- was not as Remus had expected. There was no force or grandeur. Instead, it sounded dreamy, soft, barely substantial. He kept his head bowed.

“My name is Remus. I seek an audience.”

“Hmm. Do you want something? People often want something, you know.”

Remus swallowed. He could tell that the light was dimming slightly, bringing relief to his stinging eyes. If only the witch had simply demanded his own tears! But she had not, and now this was his task. The tears of a blue moon.

“Doesn’t everyone want something, my lady?” He replied, eventually.

“Not really. I don’t.” Fear chilled Remus’s heart to hear her disagreement. But then- “no, wait. I do want something. I want a story, Remus. Do you have a story you would give me?”

Remus lifted his head. A small woman stood before him, pale and shining, her long blonde hair falling in disarray to her waist, her blue eyes staring at him with a distant kind of desire. He swallowed again. She was very cold.

“I do, my lady. I do.”


	3. Phoenix Rising

The night was black and full and thick like syrup, begging to be lived in, ready to be drunk like a draught, down in one swallow. Remus edged through it with his heart firmly lodged in his throat. Every tiny noise seemed to rattle through the stagnant air. High above, peering through the swollen leaves, the full moon was on the rise. Sirius was a shifting slick of silver moving through the shadowy trees. His shirt of mail made soft metallic sounds in amongst the night-rustlings of tiny creatures. Remus followed him. He would have followed him anywhere.

In his hand, the hammer hung weighty and solid, the tough iron head occasionally brushing through slumbering brambles that had grown off ambition and climbed higher than their fellows. Sirius would not permit them to leave without a weapon in both their hands. It was no sword, but at least Remus knew how to use it. Their playful lessons in the bright sunshine seemed as distant as a dream.

This was the last night. They had left the village at sundown, and Remus did not know if they would ever return.

They walked ever deeper into the woods, the silence between them imposed by the glittering grey light and the ashen coat of fear lining Remus’s throat. Every moment, he kept expecting a great white shape to come looming silently out of the darkness. He adjusted his grip on the hammer. They were a long way past his pools now, coming up for mid-night, and still there were no words and there was no wolf.

But she would come. Of that Remus was certain. He had left the shutters unlocked behind him; he had walked willingly under the shadow of the trees. She would come, because she would come for him.

He thought Sirius knew that too, or at least could sense it. They had not fought in the last few days, but a deep unhappiness had swarmed around them, like a miasma off a marsh. But no quarrel had emerged, because without Remus in the woods, Sirius would die. And without Sirius in the woods, wielding his sword and shield and finally drawing blood, somebody else would; not now, not today, but soon, sometime. The time had come for it to be over.

They walked for another long while. The moon shone down upon them, dappling the floor, striping the trunks with pallid, graceful light. Remus kept his eyes fixed on Sirius and his ears combing everywhere else.

A clearing opened up before them, a bramble-strewn dancefloor beneath the round silver eye that gleamed high above. It seemed beautiful. Peaceful. For the first time, Remus wondered if they should turn back. He thought of the sound of hooves on the road, of the copper-coloured horse they had left at the inn, of riding away and never glancing back. How could he not have thought of this before? They could leave, run, run far away-

The howl came before they saw her. It was a piercing, eerie thing, strange and carrying in one long, quavering note, a song of a dark night, a call to the hunt. Sirius jerked to a halt. Before their eyes, a great white shape stalked from between the trees.

She was bigger even than the rumours, a great mane of fur mantled around her shoulders. Her tongue hung from her jaws. The way she walked was deliberate, almost graceful. A shiver of fear so strong it was almost divine caressed its way across Remus’s skin. He could not look away from her eyes; liquid pools as black as the sky stretching above. They were fixed on him.

Sirius said nothing. He simply lifted his shield, stretched the sword out to the side, shifted forward like a mooncat. The wolf blinked. Remus had no time to cry out.

It was a handful of heartbeats- a clearing separated them, and then it didn’t. The wolf seemed even bigger in full flight, her ears pinned back, her teeth bared. Sirius roared and shrugged under her lunge, raking his sword along her side. She did not yelp. She simply checked her course and flew around to meet him again. Her paws made no noise on the underbrush. Sirius stumbled a little, jerked up his shield- too late, too late. Her jaws closed around his arm.

Remus ran. He did not even lift the hammer to begin with. He simply ran forward, his feet snagging, his own howl of rage and fear and turmoil coalescing into words.

“-leave him, LEAVE HIM!”

As though he were shouting at some disobedient dog. In the moonlight, Sirius’s face seemed pure white, the pain gradually seeping through his carven features. Remus could hardly look away.

The wolf paused. So did Remus. He was within touching distance of the creature’s pelt; he could see the crushed metal and the streaking blood from Sirius’s ruined arm, he could hear his ragged breathing and the long slow pant of the wolf.

“Leave him,” he repeated, his voice low, “leave him. Take me. That’s what you want?”

There was a moment of endless silence that washed around the moon-washed clearing like a tide.

The wolf dropped Sirius. She lifted her head, blood now staining the white fur of her muzzle. She turned instead to Remus. It was a sight to strike terror into anyone; Remus could find nothing but a terrible sense of rightness, of lightness, a sense of no longer being tethered.

“You’ve waited a long time for me, haven’t you,” Remus breathed, and his shaky fingers let go of the hammer. “All my life. Well, I’m here now. But you can’t have him.”

Her eyes stared him down with a terrible kind of hunger. Sirius’s shallow gasps rent the air between them. “Remus-”

“You can’t have him,” Remus told her. He could not answer Sirius truly, but he could strike a bargain, he knew it instinctively. “By the old laws and the new, you can’t have him.”

A strange shudder reverberated through the clearing, the last noise from a struck bell, the lingering light of a dying day, the silver crescent of a rising moon. The wolf blinked.

In a strangely fluid motion, Sirius’s sword passed through her side with barely a whisper. There was the tearing of skin, of fur and flesh, but it was barely audible above the silence of shock. The wolf made no noise. She snarled silently, panic flaring in her eyes, her tongue lolling. Then she collapsed to the ground. Sirius looked down at her with horror in his face. His bloody sword dropped from his hand. Remus could now see the wounds in his chest, where the wolf’s teeth had torn back his armour like dry grass and chewed down to the heart, his silver-skin chainmail hanging in rents and tatters like a beggar’s cloak.

“Sirius-” he muttered, and the night seemed to start again. Sirius fell to the ground. Before Remus even reached him, he knew that death was upon him. “No, no, you can’t-”

Sirius simply sighed. Blood bubbled up obscenely from his chest. His mirror-grey eyes watched Remus with a strange kind of calmness. He was dying; he knew it; there was nothing to do. He was always brave, always brave in the sunshine or the storm, and Remus realised that these words were spilling from his own mouth, pleas and promises and desperate sorrow in a tumultuous flood, _please, Sirius, no_.

“I told her she couldn’t have you,” he finally said, unable to go on. Sirius kept looking at him. His breath was ever more ragged, slowly being devoured by the blood and the moonlight. Remus stared back, his hands stained red, slippery and warm.

Then- silence.

Sirius’s silver eyes stilled, his hands relaxing into the brambles. He was dead.

Remus wept. He howled at the moon like a wolf. He clutched at Sirius’s shoulders like a terrier with a rat, begging again, shaking him. He felt himself tear into pieces, felt himself shatter and break in a hundred ways that he had never known were possible, so much he had not known until he had known Sirius. And now he was gone.

“I told her she couldn’t have you,” he repeated eventually, his voice scratched and strained from his mourning. “I _told_ her.”

The moon had sunk down beyond the trees. Above their heads, the sky was beginning to lighten. Remus closed his eyes.

And opened them again.

The clearing was beginning to glow. Golden lines were crawling across the earthen floor, illuminating the underbrush from beneath, approaching from every side like an encroaching flood. Remus stared at them, mute and wondering. He had no fear left in him; he would not have left Sirius’s side for anything.

The lines of light finally reached them. Remus flinched when first they came under his boots, but he felt nothing, for they ignored him completely. Instead, they stretched around Sirius. Remus found himself pushed backward by some invisible force, his hands removed from Sirius’s shoulders, and he did cry out then, but he could no more have overcome its insistence than climb up to the moon. He found himself lain a few feet away, watching as the lights grew brighter, desperately staring at Sirius’s face.

They grew so bright that he was near blinded. When he could finally look back, when the light had vanished from whence it came, something entirely strange to him had occurred.

A beautiful cage of brambles had grown up before his eyes. It was not some aimless tangle; it had a structure, a craft, evident even in the dim light of the growing day. And sleeping within its thorny confines was a great black dog.

Remus spent a while simply looking. What else could he do? How could he believe the evidence of his own senses, even though the carcass of the white wolf who had heard his words and taken his bargain was laying just out of reach, even though he had also seen the soft golden light suffuse the clearing and apparently steal his love away? The black dog slept on. Morning crept up on the forest, bringing with it small noises, the waking of a tiny kingdom. Remus tried to make sense of it. Sirius was gone. In his place, there was a cage of briar-rose and a black dog.

He remembered a story that was told sometimes in the smoky room of the inn, the story of a fair maiden who crossed paths with a witch. Some offence occurred between the two- for the rest of her days, the maiden lived as a tabby cat. She had been transformed. He turned this over in his mind as though it were a pebble in his hand.

When at last the sun was truly up and the forest was turning green around him, Remus crouched forward.

“Sirius?” He whispered. The word felt like clean air on his tongue after the fetid thickness of the past night. He could have dined on it, downed it, lived off that name for a clear full year.

In the cage, the black dog stirred.

Remus’s heart leapt with such sweet and bitter strength that he was seized by stillness. He caught his breath like a bird in his hands and spoke the name again.

“Sirius?”

With a rustle and a soft growl, the dog twitched its ears and slowly opened its eyes. Remus found himself to be quite apart from his own body, for the dog’s eyes were like none he had ever seen before. They were clear, and deep, and the grey of a summer storm.

Sirius’s eyes.

He was at the cage walls, he was tearing at the bars, he was ripping new wounds on the thorns and a frantic fervour had a hold of him because Sirius was _there_, just out of reach. At first he did not realise that the dog was snarling, that it was pressed up against the briar desperately snapping at his tearing hands. Then he did. He fell back.

It was plain as the day now blowing gentle colours across the receding sky: Sirius did not know him. The Sirius he loved and held and watched die in his arms was here, but he was gone. The dog continued to growl. Remus covered his face with his lined and blood-smarting hands.

Sirius was gone.

~

“So, lady,” Remus’s voice was trembling from the effort of speech for so long, from the effort of once again confronting that terrible moment face-to-face, breath-to-breath, but he continued, “I spent a time there, looking up at the trees and the growing day. But no could I stay there forever. I got to my feet and said my farewells-”

He stopped abruptly. The lake around his feet was creaking softly, turning to a thick layer of milky ice. The moon met his eyes. She was crying.

“Oh no,” she murmured. “Carry on. I know that this is not the end.” She lifted a lock of pale hair and dried under her white-blue eyes, leaving a skin of frost to prickle over the hair as she let it fall. Remus swallowed. But he sensed that to disobey would be to crack the fragile peace betwixt the two of them, to send her storming away, to leave him rooted to the spot in an endless frozen waste. He found his voice again.

“You’re right. I walked the forest for days. I grieved and I searched for the witch that had so plainly taken Sirius as her own. And, one day, I found her.

“She was surprised to see me, I would hazard. She had not expected that I would find her. But as I did, she found amusement in the japes of fate, as she called it, and she offered me a chance to win him back. For just as the witch who birthed me had claimed my life, I had claimed Sirius’s that night as I struck a bargain with her. The words and the meaning, they went together, you see? I didn’t know it at the time… It was too late for him, but the old laws are not so easily cheated. Who’d have thought that another witch, far away in the woods, would feel the strangeness and send her magic to transfigure him back to life?” Remus shook his head. “It lays in my head with such confusion sometimes.”

None more so than that first time in the witch’s cottage at the foot of the willow, kneeling on the packed dirt floor and sobbing without cause or seeming end. Sirius was indeed gone, but he was not lost without end. There was a way back. Remus would have taken any bargain, embarked on any quest, in that moment of revelation.

“What quest did she set you?” the moon asked him.

_The moon asked him_. Remus could not help but smile. He truly was living inside a tale.

“I was to fetch three things and bring them back to her. A red skein from Sirius’s swaddling clothes. The frozen tears of a blue moon. And the feather of a phoenix rising.”

A soft silence.

“I see,” the moon whispered. Her empty, astonishing eyes fixed to his. “Well, what more just cause is there?”

“Lady?”

She lifted a white hand and combed through her hair. A tiny bottle came caught in her fingers; she drew it forth and removed the tiny cork.

“Love,” she said, simply, and a single, shimmering tear trickled down her cheek. It fell from her jawline and landed in the bottle, and instantly there were tiny patterns of icy mist fogging up the glass. She pressed in the cork, then pressed the bottle into Remus’s hand. “Thank you, mortal… You have told me a good story.”

The chill coming off her became almost overpowering. Remus shuddered violently, drowned in sudden memories of sleeping in the snowbank, his fingers wrapped around the intense cold of the little bottle. His eyes slid shut.

When he opened them, the lake was empty. High above, the moon beamed down, her silver light as bright as the sun. The whole mountaintop was bathed in it. And Remus had her tears, safely clutched in his hand.

He realised that his feet were still very cold; looking down, he found himself still shin-deep in the water. He waded to the shore.

“Thank you, lady,” he said. Then he turned his back to the lake and started walking once again.

~

The rumours of a phoenix were harder to follow. Remus came down from the mountains and followed the winding path of the river from town to town, the same question ever on his lips, asking after a phoenix, after a firebird, after a rising streak of flame. People told him east, so he went east. He came upon great cities decorated with hunks of glittering green jade, squatting beside the flowing water and bristling with wooden jetties. The people there told him south, so he went south. He went south and south and south, working his way on a great barge laden with the same green stone and other fineries harvested from the banks of the river. Remus had never been on a boat before. At first it made him sick, but he grew hardy very quickly. The captain told him stories of the glittering jade, of the mines hidden at the feet of the mountains, of the fruits and grains they carried, of the landscape that slid by them day after day.

Remus wondered if Sirius had ever been on a boat. He probably had. He had simply never had the chance to tell him of it.

What a tale he would have to tell! he thought. When Sirius had shed the animal’s skin and lain in his arms a while, he would tell him all. Perhaps, after, they would travel to some of the places he had seen. The thought gave him a taste of hope, as tart and brazen as the yellow fruit they carried at their stern.

And then he felt the sun on his skin, truly felt its strange and fierce heat, and he truly felt the water swaying beneath the deck, and he remembered the miles unending that separated him from the forest, from the witch, from Sirius, his lover, still trapped in the skin of a beast. In the tiny sewn pocket at his breast, he carried two things: but they were simply things, they held no promises, could lift no curses. He had scaled mountains and castle walls, but there were still walls between him and his heart’s desire. Who was he to believe that such a thing could be possible?

Remus flexed his hands on the pole he carried to steer the barge. His palms now bore calluses that they had not known before; he was ever leaner, and his strength wavered. Such punishments had been heaped upon him that surely no man had ever had to bear. He tried to remember Sirius’s voice and felt a sickening swoop in his gut, for it was not there at his fingertips, it required reaching, frantic scrabbling through the debris of his mind. It did come to him, but disquiet laid about his shoulders. He stared blankly out as they sailed ever southwards.

The sun grew in stature and power. The green fields began to recede, and barren red earth began to take its place. The people along the banks were brown, some as brown as Remus, some far darker. They paid the barge no mind, plainly used to such sights, but sometimes the children would chase them along, arms waving, a stray dog or two always on their heels. Remus could not find it in him wave back. He was so far from home.

They first saw the great sand city when they were three days away. It seemed absurd; at first, Remus could not believe it was real. It was like his first glimpse of the mountains: arresting, astonishing, beyond the scope of his sight and mind. Building after building, towers and spires and great thick walls, all the same reddish colour as the sea of sand that stretched out beyond the horizon, huge docks and water ditches dug in to feed the fields and gardens that provided exquisite splashes of green. Remus felt his heart quail. Yet more walls, and strangeness, and blinds that would attempt to swallow him whole. To turn away from the path was not in him. But oh, how he faltered.

At the moment the barge docked, he felt a quiet come to him. He could not turn away. He had failed his love, he had lost the fine sheen of close and guarded memories, but he could not turn away. That he had the tears of a blue moon in a little glass bottle meant nothing. That he had stolen back Sirius’s childhood memories from the jaws of his ancestral home meant less. That he had been brave and good and faithfulness itself could have been as chaff from wheat to him in that moment. All he knew was that he had to continue.

The first person he asked about the phoenix laughed delightedly. “Ah! You have heard of the prince’s pet! Yes, he likes to bring it out when the moon is gold. Perhaps you will see it!”

The second person he asked rolled their eyes. “If you’ve come to see the firebird, you’ll go away wanting. Shut up in the citadel, most like! They think it brings them protection. Faugh!”

Remus did not ask a third person. He simply listened. The phoenix was here. It called to him in the way water would call to any lost in the desert. He needed to find it. So, he followed his ears.

Before the gates of the citadel, where the prince resided, he found a spot to sit and watch a little. And he found his way in. With a cache of lemons gathered off the boat, he bought a way past the guard. Then he blended in with the bevy of servants, learning the paths, learning the tasks and tricks that would see him safely to the chamber deep below where the firebird would occasionally cry out mournfully for the moon.

It took many days. By the time he was ready, the barge had long since sailed and the moon was swelling in the sky. Every night, he recalled Sirius’s voice, and his touch, and bore the knifing pain both those things brought to him with an enamoured kind of fortitude. It was nothing less than a duty to him, and he carried it out with the diligence of prayer.

Remus entered the chamber by the light of the torch, two unconscious guards slumbering behind him. It was an imperfect solution, but so had been everything else. The feather of a phoenix rising was just within his reach. He moved with the serenity of a ghost. He felt much like one, too.

The doors of the chamber were gold and beautifully embossed, but Remus had no time to look at the designs. As he pushed them open a crack, a wave of heat flooded out- more potent in the underground cool- and a bloody glow that nearly stymied him. But he had seen much and more by now. He steadied himself and slid all the way inside.

The chamber was plain, unlike the doors, and perfectly circular. And in the centre, upon a perch of melting gold, was the phoenix.

It was like seeing the city all over again, but far more potent. The bird truly was the sun writ small, fire and flame and spitting spark somehow constrained by feather and claw. It turned its head when Remus entered, clearly curious. Remus had to spend a moment just looking. Then he blinked to clear his eyes and saw that which lay between.

The room was heated by a vast moat of burning embers. They were emitting the unsettling light; they surrounded the phoenix on every side; both a barrier and, Remus somehow understood, a meagre feast for a creature made of fire itself. He saw that the bird was chained with a scorched rope looped around its feet. There was just enough give to allow the bird to peck at the hearthfires around its perch. It was trapped.

Remus was deeply afraid in that moment. His heart, that which he had so recently believed dead, was suddenly pounding. Sweat streamed from him, stinging his eyes and filling his mouth with salt. But still, he would not turn away. Now, he could not. In front of his eyes, there was a creature in need of help. Perhaps, he thought, the witch had known all along, had felt the injustice thrumming through the world and had sent him to rectify it. Perhaps this was his only purpose. Perhaps the phoenix would burn him to cinders, or he would collapse in agony and slowly die as he crossed the burning moat. Perhaps he would never see Sirius again, and perhaps this had always been intended.

He took one step forward, then another.

His feet did not burn. He kept his eyes fixed on the firebird; in return, it kept its jewel-bright eyes fixed on him.

He kept walking. The embers crunched beneath his feet. He found that he was speeding up instinctively, rushing to reach the perch, rushing to be away from the danger that his very being knew was at hand. From behind him, there was a shout.

He had no knife; he grabbed at the rope with his bare hands. It did not scald him. Instead, it parted easily, like dead vines, as though it had never been a tether in the first place. But Remus could feel the malice in the thing, and the firebird’s triumphant song was enough to let him know he’d succeeded. He instinctively ducked, expecting the bird to take flight. But it did not.

At the door, guards were shouldering through and freezing to the spot, staring in awe. For they saw a man with bare feet, standing on a burning floor, and at his shoulder was radiance itself, wings spread and thunderous song pealing out around the room.

The phoenix was surprisingly light as it settled onto Remus’s shoulders; its cries tapering away. Remus stared up at it. Perhaps it was that he carried the tears of a blue moon in his breast pocket; perhaps it was merely out of gratitude for its freedom; but the phoenix did not leave his side as he walked back across the coals. Any who were foolish enough to try to stop them found roaring flames blocking their path, sizzling up their spears, setting light to their hair. Remus could feel the eagerness of the bird vibrating through him, and he found himself running with it, feeling with it, like an elixir spreading through his blood, sprinting upwards, up towards the waiting sky.

A crowd had gathered in the inner citadel, ready to praise the great golden moon. They let out screams as Remus and the firebird crashed into their midst. Hearts were pounding, eyes fixed on the astonishing light, as bright as the sun, that had suddenly shone upon them. Remus felt the phoenix’s wings spread wide.

The courtyard glowed as bright as day. Some were shouting in fear, others in exultation (and Remus was among them, his mouth open and a sound pouring from it that he had not heard in many long months and his heart was like a frantic moth inside his chest, he was alive, he was _still alive_). The phoenix began to sing again.

It was beyond words, far more than the naked triumph and joy that had been expressed down in the chamber. This was glory in a wordless celebration, both a lament and a riot, liquid and sparkling and astonishing to behold. None who heard even the faintest strain of that music could fail to halt and listen with rapt attention; great emotion was called up from even the most shrivelled of hearts. Tears were shed without shame. Remus found himself weeping as he had not done since that day when Sirius had died. It was as though his heart had been cracked anew, its contents poured out onto the dusty floor. But it was a song of delight, of bliss. He felt that, too. He felt it in the depths of his being: _let there be light_.

He would find it. Or he would not. It did not seem to matter. He thought of Sirius, and found that the memory came so easily and sweetly that he wept anew.

The phoenix let out a final note. A silence fell over the plaza, somehow delicate and rich, aching with all the beauty that had come before it.

And then, at long last, the firebird took flight. Its huge, burning shape soared upwards, its heart and intent clearly fixed on the unending glow of the golden moon. Remus watched it go with his face wet with tears and a shaking in his hands. He had done such good. But he had not got what he needed. And now the phoenix rising was gone.

He became aware of whispers, of those around him pointing. At first he thought it was just because he had been the man with the firebird, but he saw that they were all watching the same thing. He turned his head.

Tucked under the frayed collar of his brown shirt was a single, gleaming feather.

~

His shoes had long since worn away. He found the roads to be far fiercer than the embers, and his feet were covered in cuts and bruises by the time he returned to the witch’s cottage. He held in his hands three things: a plain thread of red cloth; a frozen bottle of crystalline water; a gleaming gold feather that gave off its own light, even in the deepest blackness. It had been many long miles since he had heard phoenix song. Long miles and lonely nights had dampened the fire it had lit in his heart. After all, he had seen a thousand things. The great, the good, the violent and the foul. The night was black and full and thick like syrup, begging to be lived in, ready to be drunk like a draught, down in one swallow…

Inside the cottage, the witch’s pot was bubbling. Remus stared at it without seeing. The witch began to sing a strange tune in a language he did not know. Her hands were full of the tokens she had demanded from Remus, and he could hardly remember what had driven him to retrieve them in the first place.

For Sirius, he told himself. It was for Sirius.

“You are weary,” the witch broke off from her music and turned to look at him. He avoided her eyes. She came back to him. “It has cost you much, has it not?”

Remus watched the earthen floor carefully, holding the faint patterns and scuffs in his mind. The word slipped out without his say. “Everything.”

“Ah.” She sighed then, and it was like the whole forest moving in a storm. A fresh autumn wind seemed to gust through Remus’s being, shaking him a little, as though he were a sleeper.

Her music began again, scratching at the back of his neck. The pot continued to bubble. Moths had followed him inside and they now flocked delightedly to her hands, fascinated by the glow roosting there. She left him for a while.

And then she began the spell.

Afterward, Remus found he could recall none of it; none of the scents, or the strange sounds, or the sensations that had swept through the little cottage. He wondered if he truly had slept, but it had not been so- surely it had not. He would not have slept. Indeed, he could remember tiny snatches if he tried, but they fled from him like visions from a dream. She had drawn upon him with charcoal; she had screamed; there had been a sound like phoenix song.

Now he stood on the banks of the stream, his head sheltered by the gnarly old willow, his hand clutching a glass bottle. A spring morning was arising in the east. And Remus Lupin’s heart was once more whole, and completely his own.

It took him a moment, or so it seemed, to return to that clearing, in his woods, where his journey started so long ago. The wolf carcass was gone. Perhaps she had simply faded back into the earth. Remus neither knew nor cared. He only had eyes for the briarwood cage.

He knelt beside the bars. Such fear he had known, such perils he had faced, such kindness and strangeness and, oh, even a reckless kind of joy. It had brought him safely through. It had brought him back. The Lamb was gone forever.

The dog was awake and it growled to find him so close.

“I’ll not be long,” Remus whispered. He knew that it could not understand, but to say it made him feel better. He carefully uncorked the bottle. His hands no longer shook. High overhead, the sun was going down. A black night was to come.

At first it happened slowly- a pinprick, a floating speck of dazzling light- but then it was no longer slow, it was a dance, a rush, a mesmerising flood. As the sun sank down and gave up her place to the waning moon, the clearing was filled with an astonishing array of golden light that poured upwards out of the bottle. It was as though a precipice were rushing up under them. A great veil was slowly drawing back, threatening to reveal a new sight, a new road of unparalleled majesty and peril. Remus shut his eyes and threw back his head. He understood, now. He understood at last.

The light faded away. With a trembling in his heart, a hope so terrible that it tore his hands into fists, Remus looked.

The briarwood cage had burst open and slunk away. Left behind was a man, young, pale, lain on his back, his grey eyes filled with confusion. Then he looked upon Remus.

“You found me,” Sirius said.

The veil had finally been drawn back in its entirety. Remus looked upon his new road and found that he liked it very well indeed; for it stirred his heart and fed his soul with a hungry kindling. They would take many strides together, find routes not yet explored, make maps and charts and all kinds of plans made of skin and bone and silver-strapped promise. One would forget, the other would remember. In the darkest cities among a sea of sand, they would find a way back to the light of the moon. To walk miles and slay dragons meant little and less. They would kiss the edges closed and find new horizons in the curve of a smile. He was Remus. This was Sirius. So they would begin.

“I did,” he said. “I did.”


End file.
